Back in 2014, shortly after the Ray Rice domestic violence scandal, TheNew Yorker ran a cover drawn by beloved and legendary cartoonist Barry Blitt. Blitt, who admitted he didn’t actually pay much attention to football, drew a picture of a running back carrying the ball down the field in full sprint … with a gaggle of police in hot pursuit behind him. The implication was clear: NFL players are on the run from the law as much as they are from defenders, and the NFL is failing because of their inability to get all the criminals out of their sport. The Rice incident was that year’s iteration of what has become an annual tradition in the NFL — a controversy that seems to shake the league to its core, followed by the league bouncing back.

The core idea of Blitt’s evocative cartoon — that the players must be policed by the league itself, that the league has an obligation to run a private justice system — has for years been accepted as common wisdom in many circles. Recall how Michael Vick, in the wake of his dog-fighting scandal, was reinstated to the sport by commissioner Roger Goodell with a letter that began, “I accept that you are sincere when you say that you want to, and will, turn your life around, and that you intend to be a positive role model for others. I am prepared to offer you that opportunity. Whether you succeed is entirely in your hands,” a tone that positioned Goodell — a bureaucrat whose only job is to make as much money for the 32 NFL owners as possible — somewhere between father figure, Judge Judy, and God. The NFL needs to Lay Down the Law. Those players need to be Put In Line.

It is worth remembering, however — in the wake of another high-profile domestic violence incident involving now-former Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt that exploded over the weekend — that the idea that NFL players are prone to criminal behavior is decidedly, definitely not true. A 2014 FiveThirtyEight study showed NFL players, when compared to men aged 25–29 in the country on the whole, are dramatically less likely to commit crimes, particularly drug-related, DUI, burglary, and assault charges. NFL players commit crimes at 13 percent of the national average, and while certain crimes have a closer ratio, including domestic violence (which is still just 55 percent of the national average), still, across the board: NFL players aren’t criminals. They likely have a lower rate of criminal activity than people at your job do. Obviously, one incident of domestic violence is too many. But the idea that this is an epidemic is a matter of misperception rather than fact … and the NFL, as usual, has itself to blame.

Which is to say: When stories like Hunt’s take over the news cycle, remember that the NFL doesn’t have a domestic violence problem; it has an NFL problem. The NFL’s haphazard lack of urgency in its approach ends up giving the impression that domestic violence is more prevalent in the NFL than it actually is, and that the NFL still, somehow, doesn’t care enough to do their due diligence in punishing abusers. TMZ published a video Friday of Hunt punching and kicking a woman in a Cleveland hotel back in February, and the Chiefs — a first-place team with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, a team for whom Hunt was the leading rusher — cut him the very next day. It leaked quickly that the NFL had already known about the video, as did the Chiefs, who tried to obtain it from the hotel until the NFL told them to back off while it conducted its investigation. The NFL says it was unable to procure the video. Cleveland law enforcement said they never got it either, largely because the case was a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and thus, not actively pursued. But TMZ got its hands on the video and published it. According to ESPN, the NFL’s “investigation” didn’t involve interviewing either Hunt or the woman involved. Once again, the NFL was playing catch-up.

The Chiefs say that Hunt lied to them about the incident and was cut for not “being truthful,” though after the Chiefs’ game Sunday, star quarterback Patrick Mahomes said he was okay with Hunt being cut because “we don’t do those things.” But, as usual, and just like the Ray Rice case, no movement came from the NFL or the teams involved until there was an incredibly disturbing video, despite reports at the time of the incident. This time, the Chiefs, unlike the Ravens with Rice, cut ties with Hunt immediately. But their response was telling: We wanted to investigate this, but the NFL said to back off; the Athletic reported that the Chiefs “were told by the NFL to stop pursuing it later in February once the league began its investigation.”

Now, the Chiefs’ lack of investigation might have also had something to do with Hunt’s league-leading 1,327 yards rushing last year. (Hunt’s interview yesterday seemed to be an attempt to smooth the path for a return with another team, maybe even the Chiefs, after his inevitable impending suspension is over.) But the NFL is the organization that is supposedly responsible for figuring out these cases, the ones trying to head off the scandals at the pass. But they botched this investigation in the exact same way they did the Rice one. As ESPN’s Ian O’Connor pointed out, four years ago, Robert Mueller (the man who was in charge of looking into what the NFL got wrong in the Rice investigation and is now in charge of … a different investigation) “identified a number of investigative steps that the League did not take to acquire additional information about what occurred inside the elevator.” This is almost word-for-word what went down with Hunt: The NFL heard about the incident, did a cursory look around and then walked away … again, without even interviewing Hunt himself. (Hunt even got in another fight in June, and that didn’t lead to any follow-ups either.)

And this is the issue with the NFL here. It is not that it has failed to stop the (first-time) domestic abuser in its midst: that would be nearly impossible to do for anyone in any field without some sort of Minority Report–esque precog technology. But what they’ve done is, faced with another incident — involving the most high-profile player since Rice — they dawdled, they were lackadaisical in pursuit, and, most importantly, they discouraged anyone else from pursuing the matter. All this did was lead to this moment, when they are supposedly taken aback by video of the violent incident — which, again, the NFL knew existed — and they have another self-constructed public relations fiasco on their hands. And, more to the larger point, it makes it look like the NFL’s domestic violence problem is only getting worse — so bad, in fact, that even the NFL and the teams involved can’t keep up with it.

The last time the NFL was caught this far behind, with Rice, it reacted with a wag-the-dog investigation into the inflation levels of Tom Brady’s footballs that, had such a regular apparatus been used in this case, might have gotten that video months ahead of TMZ and handled the Hunt situation in a much less fire-drill fashion. (Deflategate might have gotten Bostonians furious at Goodell for generations, but it sure did get people to stop talking about Rice.) There might not be a handy distraction again this time, during a season in which ratings have bounced back up and the quality of play has improved. There are not many Kareem Hunts in the NFL. But the NFL, one more time, has made it look like there are. Prepare for another “high-profile” crackdown on a problem that might not truly exist, and one that’ll likely fail anyway. The Goodell note telling Hunt that he accepts that Hunt is sincere in wanting to turn his life around and that he intends to be a positive role model for others is surely just a few years away. Goodell will be your father figure and judge. Eventually.

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THE FEED

1:53 a.m.

Might not be the right guys to achieve that goal

One was ousted from NPR amid allegations of sexual harassment. The other left Fox News shortly after writing a column widely panned as racist and anti-gay. Now they’ve been recruited to help launch a digital news startup with the stated goal of restoring faith in media.

The Trump administration is changing the way it reviews sponsors who want to care for migrant children in government custody — backing off a requirement that all people in the house are fingerprinted.

The fingerprint requirement began in June amid the zero-tolerance policy at the border that led to the separation of some 2,400 children from their parents. The children taken from parents were placed in shelters until a sponsor, often a parent or other family member, could be found and evaluated before releasing the children to that sponsor.

But the addition of fingerprinting has slowed the process and clogged the shelters. Some potential sponsors have said they couldn’t get people in their homes to be fingerprinted because they were afraid. The information is shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and officers have arrested some 170 sponsors and others on immigration violations using the fingerprint data.

I am officially declaring e-cigarette use among youth an epidemic in the United States. Now is the time to take action. We need to protect our young people from all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. …

The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

Facebook permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier. …

Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show

Judges dismiss 83 ethics complaints against Kavanaugh because they don’t have the authority to discipline a Supreme Court justice

A panel of federal judges announced Tuesday that it is dismissing all of the 83 ethics complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh regarding his behavior during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Their dismissal did not question the validity of the complaints but concluded that lower-court judges do not have the authority to investigate or punish Supreme Court justices.

The complaints about Kavanaugh generally alleged that he lied during his nomination proceedings, made “inappropriate partisan statements that demonstrate bias and a lack of judicial temperament” and was disrespectful to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September hearing, the panel’s decision noted.

For 2020, the RNC and Trump’s re-election campaign are merging into one organization called Trump Victory

It’s a stark expression of Trump’s stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it.

Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office space rather than operate out of separate buildings, as has been custom.

The goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and — perhaps most crucially — minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the 2016 relationship between the Trump campaign and the party. While a splintered field of Democrats fight for the nomination, Republicans expect to gain an organizational advantage.

China is running factories in its internment camps. Some of their products end up in America.

This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.

The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would source sportswear elsewhere while it investigates.

President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create a unified combatant command for space operations, Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday.

“The U.S. Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military, it will develop the space doctrine, tactic, techniques and procedures that will enable our war fighters to defend our nation in this new era,” Pence said during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Jon, this week you published a piece about the Niskanen Center, a rational, culture-war eschewing, libertarian-leaning think tank that you posit could be the future of the GOP once the party evolves out of its current, absurd form. (This will clearly take a while.)

The piece inspired a Twitter commentator to point out that a lot of the center’s platforms actually sounded like President Obama’s more than anything else — a point with which you agreed. Was the 44th president really a liberal Republican all along?

anyway, Obama took elements of the old liberal Republican agenda that had been banished from the GOP: climate change, health care (where he hired the administrator Mitt Romney had hired in Massachusetts)

Ed Kilgore3:37 PM

I’d say Obama represented a convergence of two developments: Democrats warming to market-based mechanisms for achieving progressive goals, while Republicans abandoned progressive goals they used to share. Both developments were occurring under Clinton, of course.What makes the characterization of Obama as anything other than a standard liberal Democrat a bit questionable, though, is the context: six years of dealing with a Republican-controlled House (later joined by the Senate) dominated by intransigent conservatives.

But Jon’s right: Obama’s own agenda could have been supported cheerfully by those lost GOP liberal/moderates.

Benjamin Hart3:41 PM

yeah. and while jon’s original argument highlights what outliers conservatives in america are compared to other places, it’s tough to imagine obama fitting in as, say, a tory in england

Jonathan Chait3:42 PM

in some ways, tho – the tory stance on health care is to defend a state-run system!

hard to disentangle this from the existing status quo of course

Benjamin Hart3:43 PM

the overarching point is how far republicans have strayed from this flavor of at least semi-rational conservatism. are we decades away from it making a comeback in america, or, like, hundreds of years? does the party have to be electorally wiped out first?

Jonathan Chait3:44 PM

hard to project past “decades”

Benjamin Hart3:44 PM

well, you have to for this chat. I want an exact congressional map of 2142

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

the conservative movement went from a minority faction in the GOP to the biggest faction by the late 70s/early 80s to the entire party by the 90s

Ed Kilgore3:45 PM

Like all ideologues, conservatives will have to choose between being regularly competitive or occasionally winning big and then wreaking havoc until they are expelled from office.

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

it depends in part on what happens to democrats. If Democrats move sharply left, it opens more space for Republicans to court moderates Right now, the response to Niskanen’s ideas is ‘Democrats already do that stuff.” but if they didn’t, it would be easier for the GOP to co-opt that space.

I dunno. Conservatives soured on one-time heroes Reagan (before he became a saint again) and George W. Bush when they tried to do things to make conservatism more durable. As I think Jon has said on many occasions, conservatism can never be wrong to these people, so they have a tendency to eat their own as an alternative to ideological adaptation.

Benjamin Hart3:50 PM

it’s a nice little loophole

Ed Kilgore3:51 PM

All these characterization depend, of course, on how you think about Trump’s relationship to conservatism and to the GOP.

Benjamin Hart3:52 PM

indeed, which brings me to my last q: let’s say trump loses big in 2020. what effect do you see that having on the current conservative movement? would they just write him out as an apostate immediately?

Jonathan Chait3:52 PM

yep

it will take more than one loss to dislodge them

Ed Kilgore3:54 PM

Hard to say. I guess Trump may have permanently loosened some of the conservative movement’s once-rigid verities, like free trade. But if he’s trounced in 2020, yeah, I could see a standard conservative with some populist touches succeeding him. And Jon’s right: so long as they can find a scapegoat, conservative Republicans will look everywhere other than the mirror for the problem.

Black people are being left out of America’s opioid epidemic narrative

In the halls of Congress, a short bus ride away, medical professionals and bereaved families have warned for years of the damage caused by opioids to America’s predominantly white small towns and suburbs.

Almost entirely omitted from their message has been one of the drug epidemic’s deadliest subplots: The experience of older African Americans like Rogers, for whom habits honed over decades of addiction are no longer safe.

A 1974 New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled.

Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee.

The appointment of GOP Rep. Martha McSally to the late Sen. John McCain’s Arizona Senate seat for the new year will push the chamber to a new milestone: The Senate in the 116th Congress will have the highest number of all-women delegations in history.

Six states will be represented by two women in the Senate in the new congress, surpassing the previous record of four states, which was the case in 2011 and again in 2012, 2013 and 2018.

Kristin Gillibrand is still facing blowback from donors from her strong, early stance against Franken

“For every one person who shares a concern with me, I have at least one person thanking me, and it tends to be young women who come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that you stood up and did the right thing,’” Gillibrand said. She added that around the time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, there were “a hundred” who came up to her to thank her at protest rallies.

Twitter is making it easier to see your timeline in reverse-chronological order again

The latest incarnation of the original Twitter feed can be accessed by tapping the cluster of small stars — the company calls it the “sparkle” and now so shall we all, forever — and switching to see the latest tweets.